MINOS announces key neutrino measurement

06/05/12

The MINOS far detector is located in a cavern half a mile underground in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota.

Scientists from the MINOS experiment at Fermilab announced today the world’s most precise measurement of a key property of neutrinos. The results confirm that neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, have similar masses.

The new measurement is one of several announced this week by the MINOS experiment at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, and covered in a Fermilab press release.

MINOS scientists also announced their latest measurement in the search for the rare transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. In its full dataset, MINOS recorded a total of 21 electron-neutrino-like events. From these events, the MINOS collaboration was able to improve its measurement of a parameter that describes this transformation, called sin² 2 theta-13 (pronounced sine squared two theta one three), offering additional insight into how neutrinos transform from one type to another.

In 2013, Fermilab will begin sending an even more intense and higher-energy beam of muon neutrinos to two experiments in Northern Minnesota: the brand-new NOvA experiment, which will look for the mass ordering of neutrinos, and the second phase of MINOS, which will hunt for a fourth type of neutrino.

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